This paper presents a growth model that can explain the coexistence of intellectual property rights and R&D subsidies as a response to the presence of both market and government failures. The framework can also generate the observed positive correlation between these two policy tools.

I show that very complex inventions stay outside the patent system more often than medium-complexity products. I test this hypothesis using a subset of international patents data. The regressions confirm that patents and technological complexity have an inverted-U shape relation.

The prevalence of Internet-based sales was highlighted by the World Bank (Ferro, 2011) associating state-of-art technology with exporters. We use propensity score kernel matching with difference-in-differences to reveal export selection and evidence of ‘technology upgrading’ through higher...

We propose a dynamic model of a patent portfolio race in an industry in which innovation is incremental. Two firms compete in prices and in research. We study the Markov perfect (closed-loop) equilibrium of the resulting differential game, identifying a steady state in which firms compete neck...

Using US manufacturing industry data, we re-examine evidence of first- and second-generation models of R&D-based endogenous growth focusing on innovation (patent) quality. We show that Schumpeterian growth theories perform better than semi-endogenous growth models.

This article studies the firm-level productivity convergence process in the 1990s and the 2000s in France. The speed of convergence has slowed during the course of the 1990s, a fact which is explained principally by the acceleration of the productivity of firms on the technological frontier....

This paper studies the discriminatory pricing of an intermediate good and compares two models with a different timing of investments undertaken by the downstream firms, before or after the upstream monopolist sets the input prices. When the more efficient downstream firm is charged a higher...

Testing for asymmetric information in insurance markets has become a very important issue in the empirical literature in the last years. We analyze the (private) accident insurance, which has not been analyzed before in the literature, but covers one of the most important risks faced by...

After every major financial crisis, the question about the responsibility of the rating agencies resurfaces. Regarding government bonds, the most frequently voiced concern targeted “unreasonably” bad ratings that might trigger capital flights and increasing risk premia which sanction further...

We consider a partially linear time trend model with weakly dependent data. We show that the semiparametric estimator for the time trend coefficient has the same rate of convergence as in the parametric time trend model case. We also show that the asymptotic variance reaches the semiparametric...